The present invention relates to a service platform for cellular telephony and, more particularly, but not exclusively to a scalable platform that allows different services to be included therein with minimum development effort.
The new era of mobile data services introduces a rich world of content, which is delivered over-the-air to mobile devices. Wireless service providers, such as cellular operators, offering data and content-based services to their subscribers in order to increase the average revenue per user (ARPU) and reduce churn. The kind of content services currently available include various media types, such as applications, games, ringtones, images, and audio and video clips. Such content is delivered to mobile devices over various protocols, such as HTTP, WAP, MMS, EMS and SMS.
Wireless data services are consumed by users with mobile devices. A mobile device is a computing unit that can send and receive data packets through a wireless bearer. Examples of such mobile devices are cellular phones, connected PDAs and two-way pagers. The wireless network is maintained by some kind of a service provider, such as a cellular carrier. The device may use various data protocols in order to send and receive over the wireless network. The most common protocols in this context are WAP and TCP/IP, which can be implemented over any wireless network, such as GPRS and UMTS.
In addition to the network connectivity capabilities, different mobile devices have at least some of the following basic capabilities, depending on the generation to which the particular mobile device belongs:                CPU (e.g., Arm, Strong Arm)        Operating System (e.g., Symbian, Microsoft Smartphone)        Short-range connectivity channels (e.g., InfraRed, BlueTooth)        Multi-media capabilities (e.g., color display, polyphonic sounds, digital camera)        Application runtime environment (e.g., J2ME, BREW),        Wireless data client (e.g., WAP browser, MMS client)        Digital Rights Management (DRM) agent (e.g., as defined by OMA)        
Modern mobile devices are capable of using these services by downloading over-the-air a wide range of media types, such as ringtones, pictures, screensavers, wallpapers, songs, video clips and applications. Each of these media types could be represented in different formats, such as MIDI for ringtones, GIF/JPEG for pictures, MP3 for songs, MP4 for video clips and J2ME MIDP 1.0/2.0 for (Java) applications.
Thus, in the current art there are numerous services that are offered via cellular telephony. Generally each such service is based on a dedicated server and is designed and developed separately and integrated into the cellular system. Each service thus requires its own development time, which is a major bottleneck in the provision process of the service.
Furthermore, as all of the services are provided as separate entities on separate servers, there is no way in which different services can be made to work together to complement each other.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a platform for providing services which is devoid of the above limitations.